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Michael asks:
>Any chance of rewriting that for an international readership?
A layman's paraphrasing: the job of the
National Security Agency (NSA) is to be a
set of intelligent ears for the US. It gathers
data (signals), tries to filter this into
information (de-noise it to determine
which signals are relevant given some
set of criteria passed to it by other
authorities), and refines that into
information that it passes back to the
requesting authority. The requesting
authority must be "wise" in what it
asks for and what it does given a result.
Assets are limited; pattern recognition
and latency are key issues for
formulating a response within a context
of interrelated topics. (It is illustrative
to understand why the Brits and Canadians
armed B-24 Liberators with 30 caliber
ammunition vs the American use of 50 caliber.)
In other words:
1. It is given topics of interest.
2. It listens to as much conversation as it
can store and process.
3. It filters that to find conversations
that are on-topic.
4. It summarizes and passes that on to
those to whom a topic is of interest such
that that authority can make strategic decisions.
That is the intelligence game as practiced
by cryptographers. They do not determine
strategy; they enable its validation.
XML is a code for sending signals. Beyond
that, signals have to be interpreted and unless
one has rules for handling topics, it is
still just signal. All rules are local
but a locale is just another way to say
"agreement on the topics of interest".
Nodes is nodes. Properties is properties.
Tell me who gets to name the names so we can
get on with business.
len
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